By ADAM ECOM
Oakland didn't inherit baseball. It earned it. And then it had it taken away.
That distinction matters. It matters because the story of baseball in Oakland is not just a story about a team — it's a story about a city that was never given the benefit of the doubt, that built something real from nothing, that produced some of the most entertaining and dominant baseball the sport has ever seen, and that was ultimately told its love wasn't enough.
The A's are gone now. They played their last game at the Oakland Coliseum in September 2024, spent a transitional year in Sacramento, and are headed to Las Vegas. But the history doesn't move with the team. It stays in Oakland. And it's worth telling properly.
From Philadelphia to Kansas City to the Bay
The Athletics are one of the oldest franchises in baseball — founded in Philadelphia in 1901 as a charter member of the American League. Connie Mack managed them for fifty years. They won five World Series in Philadelphia, built dynasties, and then dismantled them when the money ran out. That pattern — build, win, sell, rebuild — would define the franchise for the next century.
They moved to Kansas City in 1955, where they spent thirteen largely forgettable years as a farm team for the Yankees in everything but name. Then Charlie Finley bought the club.
Finley was one of the most eccentric, infuriating, visionary owners in the history of professional sports. He wore loud suits. He had a mule named Charlie O as the team mascot. He paid his players to grow mustaches. He fought with everyone — players, commissioners, other owners, the press. He was also, underneath all of it, a genius at identifying talent.
When Finley moved the A's to Oakland in 1968, he brought with him the core of what would become one of the greatest teams ever assembled. The Bay Area was ready. Oakland was hungry. And what happened next was historic.
The Dynasty: 1972–1974
Three consecutive World Series championships. It had been done before — the Yankees did it multiple times — but never quite like this, never with this cast of characters, never with this much personality spilling off the field and into the headlines.
Catfish Hunter on the mound — smooth, reliable, the ace who made it look easy. Vida Blue, who burst onto the scene in 1971 with one of the most dominant seasons a pitcher has ever had. Ken Holtzman. Blue Moon Odom. A rotation that could shut down anyone on any given night.
And then there was Reggie Jackson. Before he was a Yankee, before he was "Mr. October" in pinstripes, he was Oakland's — loud, gifted, impossible to ignore, the kind of player who made you watch even when you didn't want to. Rollie Fingers closing games with a handlebar mustache that belonged in a different century entirely. Joe Rudi making catches in left field that people still talk about. Bert Campaneris at short. Gene Tenace behind the plate.
They fought with each other constantly. They fought with Finley constantly. They were, by most accounts, a genuinely difficult group of people to manage. And they won. Three times in a row. The 1972, 1973, and 1974 World Series belong to Oakland, and nothing that happened afterward can take that away.
The Bash Brothers and Moneyball
The dynasty faded. Finley sold off the players when free agency arrived and he refused to pay market rates. The late 1970s and early 1980s were lean years. Then Tony La Russa arrived, and with him came a new era.
Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. The Bash Brothers. Two of the most physically imposing hitters the game had ever seen, playing in the same lineup, in the same outfield, in Oakland. The 1988, 1989, and 1990 A's went to three consecutive World Series, winning in 1989 — the earthquake series, the Bay Bridge Series against the Giants, a championship that was overshadowed by a natural disaster and remembered forever because of it.
Then came Moneyball. Billy Beane and the front office that changed how baseball thought about player evaluation. The early 2000s A's — Hudson, Mulder, Zito on the mound, a lineup built on on-base percentage and undervalued players — won over 100 games multiple times without the payroll to compete with the big markets. They never won a championship in that era. But they changed the sport.
Oakland kept reinventing itself because it had to. That was always the condition of being an A's fan — you fell in love with a player, and then he got traded when he got expensive. Miguel Tejada. Tim Hudson. Mark Mulder. Yoenis Céspedes. Matt Chapman. Matt Olson. The list goes on and on. You weren't just watching a team. You were watching a revolving door with a winning record.
The Fan: Who They Were and What They Built
Oakland A's fans were not Giants fans. That distinction was everything.
Across the bay, San Francisco had a beautiful stadium, a corporate fan base, a brand that attracted tourists and tech money and national media attention. The Giants felt like a destination. Oakland felt like a neighborhood — specifically, like East Oakland, which is where the Coliseum sat, surrounded by freeway and parking lot and the kind of working-class reality that the Bay Area's tech boom was rapidly pricing out of existence.
A's fans were scrappy by necessity. They tailgated in parking lots that weren't designed for tailgating. They sat in a stadium that was, by the 2000s, genuinely one of the worst venues in professional sports — sewage backups, crumbling infrastructure, a foul pole that wobbled, a temporary seating structure called "Mount Davis" that blocked the outfield view and existed solely because the Raiders needed more seats. You had to love baseball to sit there. Casual fans didn't last.
The ones who stayed were real. They wore green and gold with a pride that felt earned rather than inherited. They knew the roster, knew the farm system, knew which prospects were coming up and which veterans were about to be traded. They were baseball people in a city that didn't always get credit for producing them.
Getting to the Coliseum meant taking BART — the Bay Area Rapid Transit system — to the Coliseum station, which dropped you right at the stadium. It was one of the best transit connections in baseball. You didn't need a car. You could come from San Francisco, from Berkeley, from Fremont, from anywhere on the East Bay line, and be at your seat in time for first pitch. The BART ride home after a win was its own experience — green and gold everywhere, the kind of shared joy that only happens when a city's team does something right.
The Shadow of San Francisco
Here's the thing nobody in Oakland wanted to say out loud but everyone knew: the Giants had more. More money, more media, more cultural cachet, more corporate support. AT&T Park — now Oracle Park — opened in 2000 and immediately became one of the most beautiful ballparks in baseball. It sat on the water. It had a splash hit zone in McCovey Cove. It felt like an event just to be there. The Coliseum, by contrast, felt like an obligation.
That imbalance shaped everything. When the A's were winning, fans came. When they were losing — or trading away the players fans had just fallen in love with — the casual fan went across the bay. The Giants had a built-in advantage that no amount of Moneyball ingenuity could fully overcome. Oakland was always playing from behind, not just on the field but in the market.
Why They Stopped Coming — and Why That's the Wrong Question
The narrative that Oakland fans abandoned the A's is one of the most dishonest stories in recent baseball history. Attendance dropped, yes. But attendance dropped because ownership made decisions that made it rational to stop going.
Trade away every player fans love. Let the stadium deteriorate for decades without meaningful investment. Spend years threatening to move while simultaneously refusing to build a new ballpark. Tell the city its market is too small, its fans too few, its support insufficient — while doing nothing to grow any of those things.
And then, when attendance drops, point to the empty seats as proof that Oakland doesn't deserve a team.
It was a setup. Oakland fans knew it was a setup. The "Reverse Boycott" game in 2023 — where fans packed the Coliseum one last time to show what could have been — drew over 27,000 people. It was emotional, defiant, and ultimately ignored by ownership. That game didn't save the team. It just made the goodbye more painful.
The Montreal Parallel
There is another city that knows exactly how this feels.
Montreal had the Expos — a franchise with passionate fans, iconic moments, legendary players, and ownership that didn't invest. Vladimir Guerrero. Pedro Martinez. Gary Carter. A 1994 team that was arguably the best in baseball when the strike ended the season. And then, slowly, the same story: attendance used as the excuse, the city told its love wasn't enough, the team relocated to Washington in 2004.
Montreal didn't stop loving baseball. Baseball left Montreal. There's a difference, and it's the same difference that applies to Oakland.
Las Vegas: A Birth, Not a Homecoming
Vegas is a different story entirely — and it deserves to be treated that way.
The new Las Vegas ballpark is being built near the Strip. Retractable roof, climate-controlled, designed for the desert heat and the entertainment economy that Vegas runs on. It's supposed to open around 2028. The question nobody can fully answer yet is: who is this team for?
Las Vegas doesn't have a deep baseball culture. It has tourists. It has a transient population. It has the Raiders, who relocated from Oakland in 2020 and have built a real local following — so it's not impossible. But baseball is a 162-game season. You can't fill a stadium on tourism alone for 81 home dates. The Raiders play eight home games. The math is completely different.
What Vegas is betting on is that a combination of locals, regional fans, and destination tourism can sustain a franchise. Maybe. The NFL proved it could work for football. Baseball has never tested it at this scale.
What Stays in Oakland
The history doesn't move with the team. The 1972, 1973, and 1974 World Series happened in Oakland. The Bash Brothers played in Oakland. Moneyball was built in Oakland. Rickey Henderson — the greatest leadoff hitter in the history of the sport, the all-time stolen base record holder, a player so singular that the sport has never produced anyone quite like him — played in Oakland. That's where he belongs in the story.
The memorabilia that tells that history stays too. Graded cards, signed pieces, authenticated artifacts from the dynasty years, the Bash Brothers era, the Moneyball teams — it doesn't relocate to Las Vegas. It lives in the history of the game, and so does the memorabilia that tells that story.
Oakland gave baseball three championships, decades of innovation, and a fanbase that deserved better than what it got. That's the record. That's what stands.
— ADAM I ECOM, Founder and Commissioner, THE BASEMALL
In Our Collection Right Now
The BASEMALL Oakland collection carries graded cards, signed memorabilia, and authenticated pieces tied to the players who built that legacy — the dynasty years, the Bash Brothers, the Moneyball era. The history doesn't move with the team. It stays in Oakland, and so does the memorabilia that tells that story.
Shop the Oakland Athletics Collection → https://thebasemall.com/collections/basemall-oakland-athletics
Up Next
Next time we're back in Oakland, we're counting down the top moments, the top players, and the memorabilia that tells the story. Coming soon.
But first — we're visiting three more cities. Here's where they began:
- Philadelphia — where the A's started before anyone knew they'd end up in Oakland, and where a different dynasty was already being built.
- Pittsburgh — a steel city that produced some of the most electrifying baseball the National League has ever seen.
- San Diego — a franchise that waited decades for its moment and came closer than most people remember.
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